fabrications, brazenly inventing new stories even when they contradicted preceding ones. An orphan at 10:00 a.m., an only son at noon, he could dig up four sisters by midafternoon, one of them a figure-skating champion. As for his father—in reality a sober civil servant—he became, depending on the day, the inventor of the atom bomb, the Beatles' manager, or General de Gaulle's unacknowledged son. Since Olivier neglected to give coherence to the dishes he served up, we would have been the last to expect consistency of him. When he came out with some utterly outlandish fable we would voice tentative doubts, but he defended his good faith with such indignant protests of “I swear!” that we would swiftly back down.
When I last checked, Olivier was neither a fighter pilot nor a secret agent nor adviser to an emir (careers he once considered). Fairly predictably, it is in the advertising world that he wields his inexhaustible faculty for gilding every lily.
I should not feel morally superior to Olivier, for today I envy him his mastery of the storyteller's art. I am not sure I will ever acquire such a gift, although I, too, am beginning to forge glorious substitute destinies for myself. I am occasionally a Formula One driver, and you've certainly seen me burning up the track at Monza or Silverstone. That mysterious white racer without a brand name, a number, or commercial advertisements is me. Stretched out on my bed—I mean, in my cockpit—I hurl myself into the corners, my head, weighed down by my helmet, wrenched painfully sideways by gravitational pull. I have also been cast as a soldier in a TV series on history's great battles. I have fought alongside Vercingetorix against Caesar, turned back the invading Arabs at Poitiers, helped Napoleon to victory, and survived Verdun. Since I have just been wounded in the D-day landings, I cannot swear that I will join the airdrop into Dien Bien Phu. Under the physical therapist's gaze, I am a Tour de France long shot on the verge of pulling off a record-setting victory. Success soothes my aching muscles. I am a phenomenal downhill skier. I can still hear the roar of the crowd on the slope and the singing of the wind in my ears. I was miles ahead of the favorites. I swear!
“A Day in the Life”
Here we come to the end of the road—that disastrous Friday, December 8, 1995. Ever since beginning this book, I have intended to describe my last moments as a perfectly functioning earthling. But I have put it off so long that now, on the brink of this bungee jump into my past, I feel suddenly dizzy. How can I begin to recall those long futile hours, as elusive as drops of mercury from a broken thermometer? How can I describe waking for the last time, heedless, perhaps a little grumpy, beside the lithe, warm body of a tall, dark-haired woman? Everything that day was gray, muted, resigned: the sky, the people, the city, collective nerves on edge after several days of a transport strike. Like millions of Parisians, our eyes empty and our complexions dull, Florence and I embarked like zombies on a new day of punishment amid the indescribable chaos caused by the strike. I mechanically carried out all those simple acts that today seem miraculous to me: shaving, dressing, downing a hot chocolate. Weeks earlier, I had chosen this day to test the latest model of a German automobile: the importer had put a car and driver at my disposal for the whole day. At the appointed hour, a most businesslike young man was waiting outside, leaning against a gunmetal-gray BMW. Through the apartment window I eyed the big sedan, solid and sleek. I wondered how my old Levi's jacket would look in so sophisticated a vehicle. I pressed my forehead against the windowpane to gauge the temperature outside. Florence softly stroked the nape of my neck. Our farewells were brief, our lips scarcely brushing together. I am already running down stairs that smell of floor polish. It will be the last of the smells of my past.
Between crisis-fraught traffic reports, the radio plays a Beatles song, “A Day in the Life.” Crossing the Bois de Boulogne, the BMW glides like a flying carpet, a private world of luxury and comfort. My driver is pleasant. I tell him of my plans for the afternoon: to pick up my son from his mother's place, twenty-five miles outside Paris, and bring him back to the city in early evening.
Theophile and I have not had a heart-to-heart talk, a man-to-man exchange, since I moved out of the family home in July. I plan to take him to the theater to see the new Philippe Arias play, then to eat oysters at a restaurant on Place Clichy. It's all set: we are spending the weekend together. I only hope the strike will not frustrate our plans.
I love the arrangement of this number, in which the whole orchestra reaches a crescendo and holds it until the explosion of the final note. Like a piano crashing down seven floors. We reach Levallois. The BMW stops outside my office, and I arrange to meet the driver at 3:00 p.m.
There is only one message on my desk, but what a message! I have to put in an immediate return call to Simone V., former minister for health, once the most popular woman in France, tenured for life at the top spot on the magazine's imaginary honor roll. Since this kind of call is rare, I first ask around to find what we might have said or done to provoke this quasi-divine personality. “I think she's unhappy with her photo in our last issue,” my assistant tactfully suggests. I skim through the issue and reach the offending photo, a montage that ridicules rather than glorifies our idol. It is one of the mysteries of our trade. You work for weeks on a subject, it goes back and forth among the most skillful pairs of hands, and no one spots the glaring blunder that a neophyte would spot in a second. I am pitched into an authentic long-distance tornado. She is convinced that the magazine has been plotting against her for years, so I have the greatest difficulty persuading her that, on the contrary, she is a cult figure at
Although the editorial staff likes to dismiss our chief's luncheons as “rather a bore,” they wouldn't miss them for anything in the world. Our boss, known variously to his supporters as Geronimo, Louis XI, and the Ayatollah, regularly hosts luncheons in order to “take stock,” as he puts it. It is here on the top floor of the magazine, in the biggest executive dining room, that our generalissimo offers his subjects clues about where they stand in his affections. His remarks range from praise couched in velvet tones to the most lacerating of rebukes, and he possesses a whole repertoire of gestures, scowls, and beard scratchings, which over the years we have learned to decipher. Of that final meal I remember very little, except that the condemned man's last drink was water. I think the main course was beef. Perhaps we all caught mad cow disease, which nobody at that time talked about. Since it incubates for fifteen years, we still have time left. The only illness reported that day was President Mitterrand's. The whole of Paris had been hanging on his medical reports, wondering whether he would last the weekend. As it turned out, he had another whole month to live. The worst thing about these lunches is that they go on forever. To save time, I sneaked out afterward through my office, without saying goodbye to anyone. When I met my driver, evening was already falling on the glass facades. It was well past four.
“We're going to be caught in this mess, sir.”
“I'm truly sorry—”
“It's you I'm thinking about, sir.”
For a second I feel like chucking the whole thing: canceling the theater, postponing my weekend with Theophile, retreating to my bed with a plate of cheese and the crossword puzzle. I decide to fight this sense of utter exhaustion that has come over me.
“We'll just have to avoid the freeway.”
“Whatever you think…”
Despite its power, the BMW bogs down in the traffic milling on the Pont de Suresnes. We drive past the Saint-Cloud racecourse and then the Raymond-Poincare Hospital at Garches. I cannot pass this spot without recalling a quite sinister childhood episode. When I was at the Lycee Condorcet, a gym teacher used to take us to the Marche Stadium at Vaucresson for outdoor sports of the kind I detested. One day our bus ran smack into a man who had dashed out of the hospital without looking where he was going. There was a strange noise, the sound of brakes, and the man died instantly, leaving a bloody streak along the bus windows. It was a winter afternoon, like today. By the time the police finished asking questions, it was evening. A different driver took us back to Paris. At the rear of the bus they were singing “Penny Lane” in shaky voices. Still the Beatles. What songs will Theophile
